The Wayward Bus

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This article is about the novel by John Steinbeck. For the album by The Magnetic Fields, see The Wayward Bus (album).

The Wayward Bus, by John Steinbeck, is one of Steinbeck's lesser novels, but its clear writing and solid character delineation testify that second-rank Steinbeck is still very good writing indeed.

Originally published in 1947, this novel contains several references to the recent Second World War (such as a wall-chart of mandatory pricing guidelines, issued by the Office of Price Administration) and America's attempts to adjust to life in the immediate postwar era. The colloquial speech of the characters is firmly of their time and place, including casual use of epithets like "nigger" and "Jap", and a male character's reference to a young woman's breasts as her "bubs".

Steinbeck dedicated this novel to "Gwyn", presumably a reference to his second wife Gwyndolyn Conger. (Sadly, they would divorce less than a year after The Wayward Bus was published.) The novel's epigraph is a passage from Everyman, with its archaic English intact; the quotation refers to the transitory nature of humanity.

Although considered one of Steinbeck's weaker novels, at the time of its original publication The Wayward Bus was financially more successful than any of his previous works.

[edit] Synopsis

No single character dominates The Wayward Bus. The viewpoint shifts frequently from one character to another, often taking the form of internal monologue so that we are experiencing a given character's thoughts. Much of the novel's length is simply devoted to establishing and delineating the various characters, which Steinbeck does very well.

This novel takes place firmly within "Steinbeck country": most of the narrative occurs at Rebel Corners, a crossroads 42 miles south of San Ysidro, California. Juan Chicoy (half-Mexican, half-Irish) maintains a small bus, nicknamed "Sweetheart". He earns his living ferrying passengers between Rebel Corners and San Juan de la Cruz. The larger and more important Greyhound Bus Company serves both of those locations on separate routes, but for some reason does not have service connecting the two.

Juan and his wife Alice also own a small lunch counter at Rebel Corners. The Chicoys supplement their income by selling food, coffee and candy to people who pass through on the bus route. Occasionally, the Chicoys provide overnight accommodations for travelers. Rebel Corners is such an obscure place that nobody actually lives there except for the Chicoys and their employees of the moment. Alice Chicoy is devoted to her marriage (the sex is good) but is in all other ways a deeply unhappy woman, who despises and distrusts all other women.

Right now, the Chicoys have two employees: one is a teenager named Ed Carson, who works as Juan's assistant mechanic and general helper. Carson claims to be descended from the famous frontiersman Kit Carson, and he wants to be called "Kit", but he is usually called "Pimples" because of his extreme facial acne. Pimples Carson (as he is identified through most of the novel) is constantly helping himself to cake or candy from the lunch counter, telling Alice Chicoy to deduct it from his wages. Alice, deeply suspicious of everyone but her husband, asserts that Carson's "tab" for the food and sweets he consumes has exceeded what her husband is paying him; she also accuses Carson of stealing food.

The lunch counter's other employee is Norma, a young waitress. Because of Alice's bad temper and misogyny, waitresses tend not to last long at Rebel Corners: Norma is merely the latest in a long series of waitresses. Norma is obsessed with film star Clark Gable. She writes long fan letters to Gable which she mails to him at his studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but these are never answered. Norma maintains a semi-paranoid delusion that there is an employee at MGM who maliciously intercepts Norma's letters so that Gable will never find out she is in love with him. At one point, Norma claims to be Gable's cousin.

A family of three, on vacation, have spent the night at Rebel Corners and are now hoping to travel to San Juan on Juan Chicoy's bus: these are self-important businessman Elliott Pritchard, his wife Bernice and their daughter Mildred, a college student. The novel's description of Mr. Pritchard is a fine example of Steinbeck's concise character delineation: "One night a week he played poker with men so exactly like himself that the game was fairly even, and from this fact his group was convinced that they were very fine poker players."

Two more transients are waiting for the bus. One of these is Ernest Horton, a traveling salesman for a novelties company. Horton makes a very colorful entrance in this novel: he limps into the lunch counter, claiming to have injured his foot in a road accident. He then takes off his shoe, revealing a bloody sock. He removes the sock, exposing a badly maimed foot. As soon as this gets the desired response, Horton peels off the "injury": it's actually one of the gag novelties made by his company! Horton is a frustrated man who hopes to launch one or more of his many get-rich ideas, but lacks the funding to put them into practice. His favored project is a kit for men who can't afford formal attire: a set of satin lapels and satin trouser stripes that can convert a black business suit into a tuxedo.

The other transient is a young blonde woman whose face and figure are so seductive that she invariably attracts male attention. This woman's real name is never disclosed: she is always passing through somewhere on the way to somewhere else, and so she uses a series of false names in her encounters with men she never expects to meet again. Shortly after she arrives at Rebel Corners, she sees an advertisement for Camel cigarettes near a tree, so she introduces herself as Camille Oaks. (She is identified by this alias through the rest of the novel.) Later, seeing an advertisement that reads "Chesterfields: They Satisfy", she claims to be a dental nurse employed by Dr. T.S. Chesterfield. In fact, she is a stripper who earns her living performing at stag functions. Camille Oaks has a low opinion of men, which is understandable when one considers the type of men she usually meets. She respects the very few men who are honest enough to offer her a sexual proposition right away, but she has no patience for the men who more typically waste her time by trying to be "friends" with her, and who only gradually reveal their true intent.

One chapter of the novel is a sympathetic depiction of George, a low-paid Negro who works as a "swamper" at the Greyhound bus depot, cleaning the buses and retrieving lost property. George finds a wallet containing $100, a windfall by his standards. He schemes to keep the money, but is seen handling the wallet by another employee. Louie, a white bus driver, returns the wallet to its owner, promising to split any reward money evenly with George. Louie receives a decent reward but then cheats George, telling him that the owner's reward was only a dollar ... all of which Louie "generously" gives to George. As George never interacts with the characters at Rebel Corners, it's interesting that Steinbeck made room for this vignette which is irrelevant to the main narrative.

Very little actually happens in The Wayward Bus. Alice discovers Norma alone with Horton in an innocent situation which Alice's suspicious mind interprets as sexual; she angrily fires Norma, who joins the passenger list for Sweetheart's next trip to San Juan.

Juan Chicoy has made this bus run many times, and he is bored with the dull routine. This time, purely for the sake of variety, he deliberately runs the bus into a ditch, telling the passengers it was an accident. The symbolism here is, by Steinbeck's standards, unusually heavy-handed: Juan, whose life is trapped in a figurative rut, escapes it by driving into a literal rut.

The "accident" has temporarily stranded Juan and his passengers in a remote area. While they are waiting for repairs to be made, Pritchard engages Camille in conversation and expresses interest in helping her in her "career": she recognizes this as a preliminary to a seduction, and she turns him down venomously. Pritchard's daughter Mildred seduces Juan; her parents are unaware of this. Pritchard assaults his own wife, partly in anger at her and partly to regain his self-importance after Camille's rejection.

Eventually the bus is repaired and everyone gets back on. By now, most of the passengers have resolved to make some change in their lives ... but we recognize that people don't always act upon their resolve. The novel ends with Sweetheart pulling into San Juan de la Cruz. For each passenger on this bus, we have the same question: will this person now make a change in his or her life, or will each of them continue in the comfortable ruts they have dug for themselves?

[edit] Analysis

Hanging over The Wayward Bus is a mood similar to that in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot (which takes place in a desert very much like the locale surrounding the Chicoys' lunch counter). As in Godot, we sense that the passengers on Juan Chicoy's bus are never getting anywhere in their lives, are never going to change. Norma has left her job, but will surely go on to a similar job in a similar place. Camille Oaks will take another name, and will continue stripping somewhere else, until her body and her face lose their beauty.

John Steinbeck was an optimist who believed in the perfectability of humanity, but The Wayward Bus is one of his more pessimistic works, implying that people are unwilling and unlikely to change. Steinbeck's optimism does manifest itself here in the way that he shows respect for the basic dignity and humanity of each one of these obscure people, even while describing their flaws and delusions.

In Norma, Steinbeck has realistically depicted an example of a celebrity stalker before that phenomenon had a name. Throughout this novel, Steinbeck gives extremely realistic and detailed descriptions to simple actions and phenomena. Juan Chicoy is missing the joint on one finger, and has a facial scar; Steinbeck's descriptions of Juan's finger stump, and of the scar, are masterpieces of detailed observation. Elsewhere is an extremely detailed description of a minor male character's attempt to grow one fingernail extra-long, along with his very credible motives for doing this.

The oddest and least characteristic scene in the book occurs when Pimples Carson recounts a long detailed synopsis of a Spencer Tracy movie he has seen. None of Spencer Tracy's actual movies are remotely similar to the plot which Carson describes. (By coincidence, the synopsis vaguely anticipates the plot of a movie Tracy made in the 1950s, after this novel was published.) If Pimples Carson's dialogue in this scene was Steinbeck's attempt to establish Carson as a creative liar, the attempt is too subtle to be clear. More likely, Steinbeck simply made up the plot of a Spencer Tracy movie that never actually existed. This decision is strangely atypical of Steinbeck, who tended to ground his novels very firmly in a real world that readers of his own time would recognize.

A film version of The Wayward Bus was released in 1957, with a largely obscure cast and lackluster direction. Much of the dramatic action in Steinbeck's novel consists of internal monologue; the film version is inevitably unable to match this, and offers nothing better to replace it. The movie retains some minor interest because two actresses in the cast have modern cult followings: Jayne Mansfield (well cast as Camille Oaks) and Joan Collins (much less appropriately cast as Alice Chicoy). Any modern viewers who seek out this film, in hope of watching a bitchy confrontation between these two cult figures, will be disappointed. The film was released in May of 1957 at the height of Mansfield's popularity and enjoyed some box office success and good notices.